Throw Bryan Singer’s original X-Men from 2000 into a somewhat hip but somewhat staid 1960s time capsule and you get X-Men: First Class, a decent prequel of sorts that benefits tremendously by having youth on its side but never fully realizes its narrative potential.

You get the sense First Class is the X-Men movie Singer wanted to make all along — a fresher, younger spin on the rise of mutants among us, this time set in the same early 1960’s as the original The X-Men comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby that debuted in 1963. And First Class does have Singer’s fingerprints all over it, from his co-writing credit to its opening scene of a rain-soaked concentration camp in 1944 Poland that’s straight out of his first X-Men film.

And this really is so much like Singer’s first X film with younger faces. You still have the noble mutant telepath Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who seeks peaceful coexistence with humanity, while the tortured master of magnetism Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) wants to lash out with vengeance because, as the previews make abundantly clear, he’s never sought peace as an option for his personal demons or those that we all know will plague mutants once they’re revealed to the world at large.

But First Class centers more on the budding bromance between Xavier and Erik before the philosophical schism that will make Erik the Malcolm X to Xavier’s Dr. Martin Luther King. Here the younger, not-bald Xavier is quite well-intentioned but naive and even arrogant, convinced everyone will pretty much accept mutants because they’re so wondrous, just as the shape-shifting Raven aka Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) accepted Charles when she and Chuck were kids. And it’s no wonder Charles believes in such peaceful coexistence considering the CIA has at least taken to a quiet team-up with Charles thanks in large part to the efforts of CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne).

But Erik’s horrific, heartbreaking experiences at that concentration camp tell him otherwise; humanity has a knack for enslaving and undermining what it fears or at least outnumbers. It’s partly what makes Fassbender so often compelling in the film and McEvoy McAvoy so often a temple-rubbing little pris.

First Class could have really explored this allegorical issue of race in 1962, just one year removed from the Freedom Rides. Instead, the action flick skips that to focus on the Cold War/Cuban Missile Crisis aspect of the era, specifically how the dapper impact-absorbing mutant Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) wants to maneuver the US and Russia into launching World War III so mutants can rise as the next stage of life on earth.

Shaw is essentially Singer’s Magneto template of the flick, right down to his unique choice of telepath-averting headgear. And also like Singer’s first X film, this powerful despot comes with his own brotherhood of evil mutants — equally-dapper evildoers that look like they teleported out of Mad Men, right down to the ever-wooden January Jones as the diamond-skinned evil telepath Emma Frost.

Naturally, this forces Charles and Erik to form their own team to take on Shaw’s gang. And this is probably the most fun part of the flick when Charles and Erik recruit mutant blue chips like the sonic-screaming Sean Cassidy aka Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones) and the plasma-blasting Alex Summers aka Havoc (Lucas Till). These scenes play out like energetic comic panels with a ’60s vibe. Really fun stuff.

The problem is this happens after some much more grounded espionage/revenge sequences with Erik, which play out more like darker James Bond action.

That’s another problem I had with First Class. Just when it settles into that ’60s espionage vibe early on it shifts to a more hip rounding up of the kids and rolls with that youthful flow. And when it starts having fun fleshing out those young characters (which really are pretty cool, especially the brilliant but ape-like Dr. Hank McCoy aka Beast) we get too much ridiculously stilted Cold War maneuverings, mostly at the hands of the abysmal Jones as Emma Frost. (Seriously, she makes Halle Berry’s lackluster turn as Storm in the first X-Men flick look like Meryl Streep.)

I think Singer and the gang could’ve easily threaded the young characters into the beginning of the film and tied them together in the middle to really build their respective characters. (Really, this film is not as character-driven as the buzz would have you believe.) With earlier scenes with these characters, ala that with Raven, you’d strengthen the motivation for them joining forces, plus you’d have even more opportunities to at least acknowledge the prevalent racial tensions of the day and how they hem so closely to mutant discrimination. For instance, just a simple, quiet scene with Charles seeing Dr. King on television or Erik reading a Malcolm X headline would have done wonders to further entrench and enrich this story without getting too heavy-handed.

Perhaps the film’s as-is scattershot narrative voice comes from the very schism behind the camera. After all, First Class isn’t completely Singer’s film. It’s director Matthew Vaughn’s, no stranger to adapting comic-book material after last year’s bloody gonzo Kick-Ass. And missed thematic opportunities aside, First Class does entertain with its youthful exuberance.

Still, I think Singer and Vaughn’s respective approaches to championing this comic-book mutant franchise are more along the lines of Xavier and Magneto’s approach to championing mutantkind. Two sides of the same coin, ever flipping but never really settling on a side.

2.5 out of 5 X emblems

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